My heart skipped a beat. “You carry?”
She nodded. “My daddy raised me to not leave home without it.”
“Let me see that thing.”
Like a pro, she dropped the magazine and cleared the chamber before handing it to me. I might have fallen in love with her right then. “Don’t worry, I have a permit,” she added quickly.
I chuckled as I handed the gun back to her. “I’m impressed.”
She smiled as she reloaded it and tucked it back into her purse. She looked back up at me, and I realized I was staring. “Are you going to get dressed?” she asked.
I considered the question for a moment too long, and she pointed down the hallway. “Clothes. Now.” She laughed and turned on her heel. “I’m hungry.”
I watched her walk to the recliner and sit down, crossing one long leg over the other. Get a grip, Nate. “Give me two minutes,” I said and walked down the hall.
After changing into a pair of jeans and a black shirt with an army green jacket, I came back to the living room to find that Shannon was gone. “Shannon?”
“In here,” she called from the spare room behind me.
I walked back to the second bedroom, which I had converted to a home office, and found her staring at my wall cork board that was plastered with photos of missing women and suspects. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her blatant snooping around my house.
As if reading my mind, she said, “I was looking for the bathroom. What is all this?”
I leaned against the door frame. “It’s a case I’ve been working on for a very long time.”
She tapped a photo in the center of the board. “I knew Leslie Bryson.”
My ears perked up. “What?”
She nodded. “Yeah. We grew up together. Our dads still play golf sometimes. It’s a shame they never found out what happened to her.”
I blinked. “Seriously?”
She laughed. “Asheville isn’t Mayberry, but it certainly isn’t a metropolis either.” She pointed to all the different photos. “What does she have to do with all these other people? Are they missing too?”
I walked over behind her. “I’m pretty sure that all of these women were abducted and/or killed by the same person. I’m just having a hard time proving it.”
She turned to look at me with raised eyebrows. “You think it might be a serial killer?”
“Could be,” I answered.
“Yikes,” she said. “I remember when Leslie disappeared like it was yesterday. It was so frightening. Stuff like that just doesn’t happen in Asheville, ya know?”
“So, you know her family?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. I’ve known them almost my whole life.”
“That’s why I was in Asheville, Shannon. I wanted to talk to the family, but they wouldn’t see me.” I took a step toward her, an interrogation technique to induce stress. “Can you talk to them? Get them to meet with me?”
She sucked in a sharp breath and nodded slightly. “Yeah, I guess so.” She reached up and fingered the flap over my jacket pocket. Then she leaned in and cut her sultry eyes up at me. “Does that mean you’ll come back to Asheville?”
I gulped. God, this woman is good. I took a step back. “Yeah, absolutely.”
She giggled. “I’ll go see them when I get home tomorrow.” She nodded toward the door behind me. “Let’s go eat.”
We definitely needed to get out of my apartment before I, once again, disproved myself as a gentleman. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”
“You wanna go back to that bar? Their food looked good,” she said as I followed her swaying hips down the hallway.
When we got to my front door, I held it open for her. “No. I wanna take you somewhere nice.”
And I did.
Two hours and a hundred dollars worth of steak and wine later, I drove her back to get her car at Bull City. I now knew how she got her job at the news station, why she thinks Legends of the Fall was the greatest movie ever made, and how she tells her daddy she’s a Republican but secretly votes Democrat. Aside from the fact that it was the first date I’d had in a really long time, it was surprisingly one of the best ones I’d had ever.
As we stood next to her car under the misty glow from the streetlight, her eyes popped open. “Oh! I almost forgot!” She reached into her bag and produced my watch.
I laughed. “I forgot about it too.”
Without hesitation, she pulled up my sleeve and draped it over my wrist. As she fastened the clasp she smiled. “I had a really nice time, Nathan.”
“I did too. Thanks for keeping my watch safe,” I said.